CAMERON UNIVERSITY
Honors Program
HandbooK
Cameron University
Revised Spring 2009
OVERVIEW OF THE HONORS PROGRAM
The Honors Program and Its Goals
Cameron University’s Honors Program provides a system of supports and rewards for students who
demonstrate exceptional achievement in their pursuit of academic excellence. The Honors Program also
provides a central focus for the pursuit of academic excellence on the Cameron Campus.
The program offers honors sections of numerous courses that meet general education requirements,
honors options in a number of other courses, and honors seminars in special topics. These courses and
honors options are open to students with high levels of talent, preparation, and/or motivation. Typically,
they are small, discussion-oriented classes, and they are often augmented by field trips, museum visits,
guest lectures, technological enhancements, and team teaching. All honors courses are acknowledged
as such on the student’s official transcript. Full listings of honors course offerings are published regularly
by the office of the Honors Program. Honors course offerings are structured to encourage students to
complete a significant portion of their general education requirements in honors courses and to
encourage students to reconsider the interrelationship between disciplines and careers in
interdisciplinary upper division seminars. The Honors Program also encourages the development of high
quality undergraduate research, honors capstone projects, and the development of honors degree
tracks in major disciplines. All honors courses and completion of comprehensive honors program tracks
will be acknowledged on the Cameron transcript.
The program also coordinates the activities of the Cameron honor societies and works to increase their
visibility and to maximize their role as hubs of academic leadership in the Cameron campus community.
Through the Forum of Honor Societies, the Honors Program is also actively involved in the
encouragement of the development, presentation, and publication of scholarly work by Cameron
students. The Forum also administers a program which grants tuition waivers and other awards to
students who present outstanding work at scholarly conferences.
The aim of the Honors Program is to produce graduates who have gone farther, learned more, and
become more capable of leadership both in the community and in a chosen field of study.
Requirements for Admittance to / Remaining in the Honors Program
Requirements for admittance to the University Honors Program are designed to identify academically
talented students who desire more from their education. In order for a student to be eligible for
admittance to the Honors Program, the student must meet the following requirements:
1. ACT composite score of 25 or above
or High School GPA of 3.50 or higher
or College GPA of 3.2 with a minimum of 15 hours of completed course work.
2. Approved Application for Admission to Cameron University.
3. Completed Application for Admission to Cameron University Honors Program (including
essay).
Students who do not meet the ACT or GPA requirements above may choose to apply, and may be
accepted on a provisional basis with the consent of the Honors Council. Students who have not taken
the ACT are asked to submit placement tests scores in lieu of this requirement.
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Once a student is accepted to the Cameron University Honors Program, s/he is expected to adhere to
certain requirements in order to remain in the program. These include:
1. Remain a full-time student (12 hours a semester), or complete a minimum of 24 hours per
academic year.
2. Maintain a cumulative GPA of 3.2. If a student at the end of any regular semester after
his/her second regular semester has a cumulative GPA of less than 3.2, s/he will be placed
on academic probation. The student will remain on academic probation until his/her GPA
has risen above 3.2. If while on academic probation, the student has a semester GPA that is
below 3.2, it will be considered grounds for termination from the Honors Program.
3. Receiving an “F” in any undergraduate level course will be considered grounds for
termination from the Honors Program.
4. Honors students are expected to participate in the intellectual, cultural and extracurricular
activities and meetings as directed by the Honors Council. Lack of participation will be
considered justification for probation or dismissal from the Honors Program.
The Honors Program Curriculum
The Honors Program at Cameron University is a University-wide honors program, so the definition of an
honors course must be flexible enough to suit all programs of study, from the liberal arts and humanities
to the sciences and mathematics.
All honors courses should offer unique learning experiences which are qualitatively different from their
traditional course counterparts, both in the academic expectations of the students and the faculty
members. Cameron University uses three elements to characterize a course as honors: 1) structure, 2)
content, and 3) process/assessment. Ideally, these three elements will combine to offer a superior,
dynamic learning environment to foster academic achievement.
1) Structure
Honors course should be small, discussion-oriented classes that provide a richly interactive
environment for learning to occur. Courses should have a maximum enrollment of 25 students,
with the majority of students being enrolled in the Honors Program. Courses may be augmented
with field trips, museum visits, guest lectures, technological enhancements, and team teaching
to provide students with an optimal learning experience.
2) Content
The purpose of an honors course is to challenge students to consider the scholarship behind a
discipline’s core principles as well as the interrelationship between disciplines and fields of
study. Students should be shown how knowledge in a particular discipline is discovered,
developed, evaluated, argued, tested, compared, and applied. The emphasis should be on the
course’s qualitative differences rather than quantitative differences in the amount of work
assigned in that course work should focus on open exploration and discovery rather than factual
assimilation.
3) Process/Assessment
In honors courses, students are expected to take a greater responsibility for the process of
learning than in traditional courses. Typically, evaluation methods and assessment tools will
differ from those used in traditional undergraduate courses with a greater emphasis on critical
thinking and application of knowledge. Instructors are encouraged to take advantage of the
smaller number of students to use individualized examination techniques, such as open-ended
questions, oral exams and/or portfolios.
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All students enrolled in the Honors Program will be required to complete nine hours of core course
credits. These nine hours must be completed in order for a student to graduate with an “Honors”
designation on his/her transcript. The three courses are:
HON 2113 Honors Colloquium: Great Works I
HON 2123 Honors Colloquium: Great Works II
HON 3003 Honors Seminar
The student may then select a minimum of 12 hours from the following general education courses
designated as honors:
Honors Composition I
Honors Composition II
Honors U.S. History Since 1865
Honors U.S. History to 1865
Honors American Federal Government
Honors Fundamentals of Speech
*Other courses designated as Honors in the Class Schedule
In the event that a student cannot complete the minimum of 12 hours of honors general education
courses, s/he may elect to establish an honors contract using the guidelines provided to meet the
minimum number of hours required. The course must still meet the criteria established by the
University for meeting the student’s general education requirements. The student may take a maximum
of 6 honors general education courses using honors contracts.
Honors Contracts
An honors contract is designed by incorporating honors elements into a traditional course so that
honors students may earn honors credit when honors courses are not available or unable to fit into the
student’s schedule. Honors contracts should not be used when an honors course is readily available and
able to meet the student’s needs for timely graduation. Under no circumstances may an honors contract
be generated after the course has been completed.
For traditional courses, the honors contract should adhere to the goals described for all honors courses
as much as possible. In particular, the honors contract should provide the student more opportunity to
delve more deeply into the methodology, structure or theory; address more sophisticated questions;
and satisfy more rigorous academic standards than is normally expected by the traditional course
syllabus.
Whenever possible, the honors assignments should be done as an alternative to some or all of the
regular course assignments. Simply increasing the volume of work required does not constitute an
honors activity. Rather, the assignment should differ qualitatively from the regular assignment and allow
the student opportunities for exploration and creativity. The time required for the assignments should
remain commensurate with a comparable honors course having the same number of credits.
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